Educational Principles The centre’s decade of experience in the detailed conception, coordination, and delivery of international educational programs spans every educational level (bachelors, masters, and doctoral) of the study of architecture and spatial planning, in both theoretical and practice-oriented formats. Courses are taught in English, German, and could be offered in Spanish as well. Our curriculum is distinguished by:

interdisciplinary connections (collaboration among different disciplines and departments, faculties, and universities);

transdisciplinary approaches (cooperation with local NGOs, civil society, municipal administrations, district offices, and business actors);

cross-cultural character (work with international students of different nationalities, cultural backgrounds, and religions; work with refugees).

The focus of teaching up to now has been on central places and formal design and planning processes (such as an inclusion check on the land use categories), as well as processes of insurgent urbanism and peripheral sites (such as the activist practices of urban minorities in public space). Educational elements of our work include interest-based learning, open-ended project work on specific places and processes, supported by clear methodological and theoretical orientations. The staff of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space teach in self-directed formats (lectures, presentations by consultants, standard teaching formats, keynotes, seminars, etc.), and in the form of “academic teams” (co-teaching), a format with an international character that we systematically developed with various international colleagues in Vienna. Social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and other open source-based approaches support teaching, as well as the provision of teaching materials in printed and digital form (readers, written summaries of talks and lectures, presentations, documentation). In the last section of the 2015 book published by Chiara Tornaghi (CoVVP 2009) and Sabine Knierbein, Public Space and Relational Perspectives, eight innovative educational challenges for a revised approach were developed for an interest-based and contemporary form of process and project design for university teaching in architecture and city planning in a rapidly changing global educational landscape. Our motivated students, who frequently rate our courses very highly, have also expressed their fascination with the versatility, complexity, and depth of the different approaches at the interface of urban design, urban research and urban planning. Supervision of work on master’s and PhD’s theses with a thematic link to local, urban, and international urban development, urban design theory and planning theory is ongoing at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space, spanning empirical urban research, exploratory city planning, experimental urban design, and research-oriented urban development. Advising on doctoral dissertations began in the 2015/16 academic year. Associate Professor Dr. Sabine Knierbein is currently supervising an interdisciplinary group of young researchers specializing in the subjects of urbanism, connecting urban studies, urban design theory and planning theory. Master students supervised by her has been awarded the 2011/12 ArchDiploma Prize in the Best Theoretical Thesis category in the Faculty of Architecture and Spatial Planning at the TU Wien as well as the 2012 Vienna Social Innovation Award. Two master theses supervised by her have meanwhile been published (Thesis Bronner/Reikersdorfer and Suitner).